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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

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Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#141

Post by mrweasel »

wjoe wrote: post #16
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…

For a while now I've suspected that memory management on OS X is actually terrible. I have no really proof, because I just run everything memory intensive on Linux. At work I have a few Python script that eats a few gigabytes of memory, it reads in data, and basically just loops over it, selects the stuff it needs an generate a few XML file (10 to 20MB worth of XML).

All this takes maybe five minutes on Linux, on Mac OS X it will freeze the OS for long periods of time and take 40 minutes to run. In terms of hardware, the Linux box has less RAM, CPU and slower discs.

Regarding the Javascript stuff: Part of it may be that Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. People develop on and test for Chrome (because everyone uses Chrome, right?). Chrome does have the better Javascript engine, still, I believe that much of the slow Javascript on Firefox (an other browsers) could be avoided if people bothered testing a little more.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#142

Post by enraged_camel »

wjoe wrote: post #16
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…

>>I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X.

Safari is the only logical choice on OS X laptops, at least. Everything else just eats up the battery like crazy.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#143

Post by drew-y »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #57
addicted wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was little more than a toy scripting language used to animate stuff and change layouts when html/Css wouldn't fit for the greatest part of firefox's early existence. At the time it was probably the appropriate decision. Now, it's a huge burden on Firefox and it's good to finally see progress on this front.

Since Javascript is just a language that happens to execute client-side within the browser, why can we not use an existing language syntax (or an existing language entirely) for this purpose? For example, Go, Python, Rust, or perhaps Perl? It feels like a broken shell scripting language that really should have been replaced.

Since the introduction of ES2015, JavaScript has actually been a really nice language to work with. It's been really well implemented and optimized by browsers lately. So I don't really see a good reason to switch languages suddenly. That being said you'll probably be able to compile and run all sorts of languages for the web with WebAssembly in the near future.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#144

Post by mrweasel »

nfriedly wrote: post #47
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

> No add-ins (except for Firebug). You might want to try Firefox's built-in Web Console. I switched a year or two ago when it was less powerful than Firebug, but notably more stable, and I haven't gone back since. > except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing Can't argue with you there. At last exiting full-screen video no longer takes the entire browser out of full-screen.

>You might want to try Firefox's built-in Web Console

Maybe it's a personal thing, but I much prefer the built in developer tools on Firefox to that of Chrome.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#145

Post by [deleted] »

nfriedly wrote: post #47
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

> No add-ins (except for Firebug). You might want to try Firefox's built-in Web Console. I switched a year or two ago when it was less powerful than Firebug, but notably more stable, and I haven't gone back since. > except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing Can't argue with you there. At last exiting full-screen video no longer takes the entire browser out of full-screen.

[deleted]

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#146

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

luckydude wrote: post #140
alyandon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open. I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.

I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.

Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#147

Post by Sylos »

tobias3 wrote: post #75
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super surprising to me, because irccloud is exactly what we use at Mozilla. Everyone seems happy with it's performance, and obviously most people are using FF.

As always it's probably a plugin. You could integrate the functionality of plugins which everybody uses, such as an adblocker (Instead of pocket? You are already doing it with the developer tools) -- but you get all your money from Google...

Tracking Protection is pretty much an ad-blocker. It's default-enabled in Private Browsing and you can enable in normal browsing, too, by setting "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled" in about:config to true.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#148

Post by RussianCow »

AstralStorm wrote: post #88
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Except mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.

Power usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#149

Post by charlee »

nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I have this exact same problem, in fact I could have written your comment word-for-word. I also cannot reproduce it reliably, but it started in August.

I also switched from Chrome, but for slightly different reasons...I got to thinking about Google, and Chrome,and ad-blocking, and it occurred to me that Chrome will probably never allow extensions on Android, not because it's technically not possible, but because ad-blocking is bad for business (if your business is showing ads).

How does the Chrome team reconcile this? We know that ads are annoying, and ads can track you, and some ads can even be malicious. It seems that blocking ads make a browser better. But the Chrome team is not allowed to block ads on Android, so they are purposefully making a worse mobile browser.

Anyway, I do a lot of surfing at night in bed on my Android tablet, and I'm going to stick with Firefox.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#150

Post by bemused »

bitL wrote: post #55
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

Chrome became really really really slow on Ubuntu in the past year, no extensions installed. Every time I use it on a high-end Core M ultrabook, the CPU/RAM is eaten, the whole system becomes laggy, Google Hangout/Slack voice chat/Skype gets interrupted all the time etc. Not sure if you gain anything by moving back, sadly :(

chrome on linux doesn't seem to get much attention for quite a while now: got affected by this [1] more than 2 years ago and been quite happy with firefox for surfing & dev ever since

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=393395...

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